Tag: imaginal

Archetypes of Self and Path

There is always an image at work in how we hold ourselves – running below the surface, shaping what we can do, what we can’t, what we even let ourselves want. This practice brings some of that into the light by trying on other images, one at a time, and noticing what stirs.

Settle. Let the mind rest into the whole of the body – steady, collected, unhurried. Tune into the texture and tonality of how you are right now. Then, one at a time, drop into each archetype like trying on a new coat in a mirror. Amplify it. Let it move into the body. Notice what resonates. Notice where something in you resists. Notice what surfaces. Each movement is its own kind of discovery.

The disciple – in reverential study of a tradition.
The artist – endlessly making, combining, evoking.
The outsider – inhabiting the in-betweens and the undercommons, outside of systems, speaking truth to power.

Each brings a quality of presence. Try them on. See what they make of you.

For further reflection, see Rob Burbea’s talk In Love with the Way.

Desire that Builds Worlds

There’s a kind of wanting that moves underneath the everyday wants. It flows like an underground river. This is deeper than the wanting that has an object – the next thing, the better version, the destination. A current. A yearning that animates us. Try as we might, it can’t be ignored.

To be human is to want. To want is, at times, to suffer – to take on the big creative project, to welcome another into the family, to move toward what we love knowing it may also break us. Many traditions offer ways out of this. This meditation moves the other direction: into desire, and then through it.

The practice has three movements.

First, set aside what you’ve been told about desire – that it’s the cause of suffering, that it’s un-spiritual, that it should be renounced. Let those teachings rest for the duration of this sit. Trust that desire is holding something important for you.

Second, find the wanting in your body. Let a particular desire come into focus, whatever it is. Then go further: under the surface want, what’s the deeper need? Under the need, what’s the yearning at the very core?

Third, when you’ve arrived at something true, open to it. Receive it in your whole body. Let it move through you as a current rather than as an idea or a problem to solve.

What’s discovered, met this way, is that the yearning was never really about lack. The quality we were reaching for is already here, already moving through us. The yearning reaches for itself.

The practice comes from Rob Burbea, whose talk Opening to the Current of Desire goes further into the territory.

The world offers itself to your imagination

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

(emphasis mine)

We adopted a cat five weeks ago. Her name is Mimi and we affectionately call her Memes. She celebrated her 1st birthday this week.

I wonder about her life. About her past as a stray on the street. About what she really thinks of this apartment and these two humans that are now her loving companions.

Mimi is vicious when pouncing on a bee soft toy; tender when snuggling to be brushed. She closes her eyes and nudges her head towards the window to smell the outside air. She perches on a shelf and watches us go about our busyness. I bow to her while blinking slowly, doing my best to communicate love and safety.

Since Mimi has come into our lives, I’m moved by her softness and the raw animal of her being. I’m touched by the divine aliveness that fills her graceful movements.

I’m humbled by this creature that depends on me to survive. I come across a reddit thread asking what to do in their cat’s last days. I know it’s likely I’ll outlive Mimi and be witness to her death. The sadness I feel is poignant and clarifying: I choose to move closer and to love her more even though it risks greater pain.

I sit quietly and consider this imaginally. Mimi offers herself to my imagination. The image of self, other, and world has shifted to include her. The threads of my life are now interweaving with Mimi’s. A new meaningfulness unfolds, felt but not named.

Where there is love there is image. When we open to something and find this sense of love, we can recognise that the imaginal is working away in the background, concocting a sense of things, finding our place in the world.

This is a different move from reducing suffering or letting go of clinging. Sometimes it also opens us to grief and pain — there is always that risk. What it promises in return is deep meaningfulness, found in the particulars: softly breathing curled up in a ball, meowing in excited greeting, yawning after a long nap.

—

The meditation workshop on Imaginal Practice I’m leading is coming up next week. If you feel the world offering itself to your imagination, come explore with me.

Uncle Chwan: A ghost monk

I never met my Uncle Chwan. I’ve only seen a small sepia-tinged photo of him on the altar at my Aunty’s house, next to photos of Ah Ma and Ah Kong, my paternal grandparents. The second youngest of eight siblings, he was kind and gentle. My Dad and Aunty talk of their little brother as the nice one of the family. I can sense the truth in this.

All eight of my Dad’s siblings moved from Malaysia to Australia to go to university. After graduating with an accounting degree, Uncle Chwan decided to become a Buddhist monk in the Thai Forest tradition. This was the time — the family was healthy and well, he’d finished his studies, and something called him to live a different life.

He travelled to Thailand to ordain in the Ajahn Chah lineage at Wat Pa Nanachat — known locally as the monastery for westerners. The details are cobbled together from stories I’ve heard from family and from a monk who was there at the time. To ordain he was required to arrive with few possessions and no money, taking motorbike rides through jungles, giving up everything he knew to live with strangers. He turned his life upside down at 24 for a chance to dedicate himself to something greater.

Uncle Chwan’s Dharma name was Nyanaviro in Pali — meaning “courageous in wisdom” or “one whose courage is knowledge”. This Thai Forest tradition is characterised by austere, relentless dedication to the path.

A couple of years after ordaining, Uncle Chwan became ill. The abbot of the monastery had encouraged the monks to be equanimous with their illnesses rather than seek medicine, a reticence to which Uncle Chwan was already inclined. When his illness got worse, he continued meditating in his kuti. After he didn’t come to the morning chanting and meditation, he was found dead by another monk.

It was incredibly rare for a monk to die so young. The monastery held a special ceremony and dozens of monks travelled from the surrounding towns to pay their respects. But almost all of my family couldn’t travel to such a remote place at that time. The cause of death was said to be encephalitis caused by malaria or rabies. If caught early, this could have been treated. Death by equanimity.

I’m haunted by his ghost. He first came to me in meditation cautiously, hesitantly. I was unsure of opening to this dimension and the image flickered and faded in turn.

Eventually I allowed the image to come. Uncle Chwan visits me — adorned in ochre robes, shaved head, thin-framed glasses. He sits by me. Sometimes he offers me a smile, or a gentle hand on my shoulder. I sense that he is always with me, a phrase I’d dismissed when hearing others talk about these presences. I feel held in a kind embrace, watched over. During a month-long retreat, I experienced so much pain and mental anguish that I felt close to giving in, but I continued on, comforted by his presence in my imaginal sangha. He sat among my field of support.

I can’t explain the tenderness and kindness I feel from this image. What I feel is love. I feel heartbreak. I feel a family that was shattered at his death and maybe never recovered. I feel both endless grief and limitless compassion. I break down into tears when I see his half-smile. I’m held in his Loving Presence.

— In loving memory of Uncle Chwan and Kow Ee Poh.

An Image of Existential Crisis

~4 minute read

I’m 10 days into a 21 day silent retreat. Here with one dear friend, at another friend’s property on Birpai land. Each dawn and dusk my friend and I quietly make our way to the riverbank to try to get a glimpse of the platypuses playing in the water. They are shy and smaller than I expect – while keeping our distance we can only just make out their beaks and heads as they coast along the water, dive under, and resurface.

My friend leaves in the morning and we share a warm goodbye. I spend the rest of the day in a daze. Night falls and I settle in to sit. I reach for my shawl and find my friend has left me a parting gift: a block of vegan chocolate and a note of encouragement. I break down into tears, an overwhelming sense of being lost, lonely, and undeserving of such kindness.

The following day I stumble around. I question what I’m doing there on retreat. I wonder why I needed to leave my life in order to go be quiet somewhere far away. I doubt the value of practice and my own place on the path. I lose interest in the birds, the trees, the animals. My mind becomes a solipsistic, harsh desert. I realise I’m in a mini existential crisis. I hope it stays mini.

For solace, I turn to Rob Burbea’s Dharma talks. I bring my headphones and a cup of tea to the riverbank and find a stable rock to sit on, carefully watching for snakes. Rob’s soft, kind voice reaches across space and time, carried by scratchy audio recording. He speaks of being “in love with the way”, of cherishing the path itself, and how there are many different fantasies and myths of the path that we inhabit and take on. These images form the sacred ground of practice. We move between images of being healed, to the reverence of tradition, to being a scientific researcher, to seeing all of the path and life as art. I sense into how my own sense of the path had become small and contracted, not able to hold what was asking to come through. I sit with this, testing out different images of myself on the path.

I am an explorer of consciousness.
I am a student of Dharma.
I am a lover and mystic.
I am an artist, creating a life.
I am a servant of the divine.

I see all of these as true, as false, as empty, as image. They are vivid like rainbows in the sky, appearing but without solidity or fixed location. They have no independent existence, no basis of their own, yet they are alive and animating. They shift my way of looking. Each time I reorient myself I notice a different North Star, a different direction to head, new aspects to love and cherish about this life and path.

This immediately moves something deeply in me. I rediscover a love of practice. I see myself in a different light and realise that I don’t want to be nobody, and that my attempts have obviously failed.

In the years following the retreat, I continue unfolding imaginal practice. I notice that practitioners each have their own unique fantasy and myth of the path. To a large degree this image influences, if not determines, their engagement, fire, dedication, and passion for practice. It sets up how they will respond to difficulty, uncertainty, and suffering. I see students grind away, stuck between traditions, as well as those who happily dwell in the in-between spaces, letting their fantasy shift and grow.

I realise I’m being called to teach imaginal practice. I recognise that teaching this is challenging, and perhaps even disturbing for many people. However, the response has also shown that it is validating – confirming that people already encounter the imaginal in practice, without a name for it. There’s already a sense of the beauty and love available when allowing this in. The practice and teaching of the imaginal becomes part of my own image and sense of my own path. I want to point to something, to gesture towards this, to make something visible that is quite likely unexamined and unexplored.

Meditation Workshop: Exploring Imaginal Practice

~ A full-day Dharma Deep Dive ~

Event details

9:00 – 5:00 pm AEDT (Sydney time)
Sunday 3 May 2026
Online via Zoom

Description

Why does practice come alive for some people and not for others? Often this has to do with the sense of the path itself. When practice is alive and full of fire, there is a rich sense of the possibility and vision of the teachings, and a sense of the capability of the practitioner. This is the guiding image of practice that can be sensed into, played with, and reignited through imaginal practice.

This workshop will open up possibilities of Imaginal Meditation Practice. More than just imagination or visualisation, this is the exploration of how images (seen, felt, heard, and known in the mind) arise in meditation. When we move towards images rather than passing them off as distractions, spontaneous experiences of meaning and depth arise. Opening to the imaginal also opens to resource and creativity, even becoming a source for novel ideas and drawing connections that can be taken into art, work, and relationships.

We begin our exploration by tuning into the felt sense of the body and then bringing in different images of the body that can shift perception. Sitting as a mountain brings grounding and stabilising, seeing the body as filled with light is often energising, or seeing all experiences as waves in an ocean of awareness opens up spaciousness. Practising with images reveals that experience is more fluid and constructed than we tend to assume. This also makes Imaginal Practice a way to open up insight and to understand emptiness.

The power of images comes from embodied experience — a kind of poetic perception. They reveal more than just the physical world or the mind, opening to unexpected resonance. These practices draw from the work of Rob Burbea, who taught extensively on extending insight meditation into other dimensions of experience to open more freedom and meaningfulness.

About this format

This workshop curriculum will be taught through a method of embodied experience delivered through guided meditations that point out key insights, supported by talks, Q&A, and group discussion. The day will include grounding, breathwork, and anchoring practices to support your exploration.

You are asked to participate by engaging in the practice during the session so that you get first-hand experience. You are also asked to bring your questions and practice experiences to the whole group and to your practice pod, as well as to listen generously as part of the community.

The event is structured as a full day to provide the opportunity for deep focus, while you temporarily put aside other concerns.

Please attend for the whole day. It can be highly beneficial to be in silence for the day, and especially to minimise technology usage. However, you are not required to be in full silence. We encourage you to do what you can to create a supportive environment for your practice.

This is an online event. You will need a device with Zoom installed. Please ensure you have a consistent internet connection.

A background meditation practice is recommended. You do not need prior experience with imaginal practices or a strong capacity for detailed visual imagination. This workshop is geared primarily towards practitioners with an established practice, but open to those who sense possibility here. This work can open unexpected territory — please consider your own situation in terms of feeling grounded and stable. After registration you will receive further information and resources.